Process Not Product

Give the gentle reader saatch aur himmat, Z said in Turkish.

Translation please, said Devina.

Truth and Courage.

Keep them engaged, said Tran. Be gentle with the dear reader. They are educated. Challenge them.

What’s a word doctor, said Leo.

Someone who fixes manuscripts with a sharp axe, said Tran waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston-driven fountain pen splattering blood red ink on everyone in his radius. The pen is mightier than the sword. Edge focus. WE, you and I, them, he, she and us aint going anywhere. We live forever.

In your dreams, yelled Devina. Everyone’s doing hard time. It aint nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Have mercy.

Rita, an orphan and independent visionary writer from Banlung chimed in with a voice sweeter than a Buddhist bell, I’m going to be an English facilitator and historian. I’m going to stand on a street corner begging people to give me their wasted hours.

Where have I heard that before, asked Leo, an activist in exile from an orphanage on the Yangtze, heavy with silt and six trillion cubic meters of garbage flowing to the South China Sea.

What will you do with collected time, said Tran, Visit sick children in hospitals where they do DNA evolutionary experiments to stem the cells, can you sell the stems?

Speaking of stems, I’m moonlighting as a gardener, said Omar, There’s nothing more beautiful than nurturing nature in this impermanent life. We plant seeds for trees we will never see mature. Another leaf leaves life’s tree.

If you plant roses and need someone with experience to take care of the thorns give me a shout, said Tran, a one-legged Vietnamese child wearing his heart on the sleeve of a ragged 101 Screaming Eagle t-shirt.

A bird pressed its breast against a thorn singing, O what a beautiful morning o what a beautiful day.

A poet, like a chef or gardener, needs everything because they love everything.

I’m going to study Donatello, said Devina.

Who’s he?

He was a great Renaissance artist. He was born in 1386 in a place called Florence, Italy. He was honest had integrity and was super original. Technically he worked with anything. You name it: wax, bronze, marble, clay, all kinds of rocks, wood and glass. He raised the status from someone who created beauty to a craft, a real artist.

Painting with smoke and mirrors, said Tran.

Hey, that’s what the Greeks said. They believed everything was beauty and order, said Rita. Order, structure, design, form, function, oratory, mathematics, musical notes, all the beauty originated with them didn’t it?

You got it, said Tran. Hey, you know what, I think I’ll take the day off and be creative. Ha.

This present instant contains all reality, whispered Zeynep. We can call this experiment The Theory of Z, about a young precocious girl, her friends, artists and seers. Why not?

I taught a blind nomadic gardener/janitor/gravedigger and kid friends about emotional life in an alien schizoid civilization called Turkey, said Z. We shared values, stories and art with a free spirit.

I’ll tell you a secret. There’s two of me. One young and one old. The older is Kurdish and plays a cello in a cemetery. Can you dig it?

Aliens and fantastic probabilities said Rita. Tell me the difference between possibility and probability. It’s about process not product. Whew, now that’s deep.

Yeah, said Devina, We’re all in the shit, it’s only the depth that changes. Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s something else speaking in the abstract.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said an authoritarian demanding Realist vomiting contrarian hypotheticals, truth, logic, verifiable data based evidence, scientific facts, precise specifics. We must ascertain the immediate personal moral and ethical values with lofty principles and assistant principles on principal.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Ambivalent

Bursa, Turkey residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt.

A thin man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his formless form commanded a rolling wagon filled with shredded silver wire.

A black trash bag on the rear contained cardboard and a draft of The Language Company.

He snapped a long whip at a white horse wearing brown blinders. Red, green, yellow and blue wool tassel tufts waved from its sweat beaded neck. Small copper bells tinkled.

His wife’s thin, happy hungry face was a skeleton of bones. Her senses were accustomed to roots, soil, inhaling damp earth smells and back breaking labor in spring rain, summer heat, cool autumn winds and frozen earth.

Riding next to her husband hearing leather lash skin felt good. A reassuring stimulus snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Blakey pounding percussion and Zeynep's cello complementing the steady clip-clop rhythm.

They were richer than a poor parent’s skin. They owned their stomach’s hunger.

“Here we go,” they sang in Kurdish.

Nearby, a cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed.

An old man arrived with his scythe. His well-adjusted eyes surveyed nature's vociferous beauty. He unwrapped a golden yellow scarf from the curving blade of his hand-me-down tool.

The scythe was eight feet long tapering to a sharp point.

Sitting on a wooden stool he refined an edge with wet-stone strokes.

Waving, he cut a waving garden.

Death watched. Ambivalent.

At that precise moment a blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.

The Language Company

Adapt

Adapt, the balloon man lived below the hammam. Yes mam.

Adapt, Adjust and Evolve collected everything for a fire. One morning he flamed his life below a stone memory hut where someone - he didn’t remember whom - lived, worked and expired.

Internal passions blazed yellow and red.

Sparking a majestic canvas Adapt carried his bouquet of air-filled flowers across spring fields firing dawn with pink, red, green, yellow, and blue. Dreaming purple violets and daffodils spilled balloon imagery into children’s retinas.

His voice sang across time’s river, Create like a God, order like a King and work like a Slave.

Walking through spring with Courage, a personal pronoun, his flowing mind-stream movie flashed into around through a fine unknowing knowing starlight universe. Pure images were diamonds in his mind.

First thought, pure thought.

Sky mind.

Cloud thought.

His flaming life energy sang, What is life?

A game of experiences we get to play. Help others.

Expanding energy waves created screaming eagle dancers.

Two Golden Eagles fought in tall grass to dominate a female. Flashing anger with yellow lightning eyes and striking out with a sharp talon she balanced on a strong extended leg. A curving white tip slashed at males circling with desire, cunning and stealth. Pirouetting she danced between them protecting her flank near a fallen tree trunk. Her wings extended over green forests, Uludag, blue shorelines and across oceans.

Nearby trapped behind high voltage fences on a desolate brown hill studded with boulders twenty wolves died of heartbreak.

One wolf’s eyes were a fluorescent emerald green Aurora Borealis retina patina, refracted surreal prisms.

I am a lone wolf, like you, said Lucky. We share an R7 variant dopamine receptor gene DRD4, a chemical brain messenger for learning and reward. R7 is found in 20% of humans.

DRD4-R7 increases curiosity and restlessness, said Lone Wolf. Humans with R7 seek out new experiences with known pleasures, take more risks and explore new places, ideas, foods, relationships, and sexual opportunities. They embrace movement, change, adventure, migration and a nomadic lifestyle. I am dying here. I was born free.

I feel your pain and alienation.

Wolves needed mountains, valleys and wild rivers. They were hungry to escape an artificial prison.

Lucky knew why midnight welcomed Howling Wolf.

Weaving A Life, V1

Babble Fish

A Bursa schoolgirl waiting to be grilled maternal fish bait stood at a bus stop with a cell phone implanted in her cerebral cortex. Her mom connected, “Are you alive?”

“I dream I am a free person in a free country. I've escaped the tyranny of what if’s and maybes. I have grit.”

“Enough babble fish jack-o-lama-trauma,” said Zeynep the Director. “Cut to the chase singing songs with abundance, wonder and gratitude."

Ms. Linguist picked Mr. I Love History up. They screwed. She dropped him off. He never paid now. He always paid later.

“Life gives you test first and the lessons later,” said Zeynep. “Blind love with a little luck is a never ending adventure.”

Stressed out over-medicated Turkish kids carried bags of fresh brown bread, black olives and poisoned red apples home to mommy dearest here’s something from my secret garden.

Weaving A Life, V1

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